Hubris
by readingrainbows
Summary: If he closes his eyes tight enough, screws them shut until little bursts of color dance behind his closed lids and his head begins to throb steadily, Beck can almost remember how happy he'd once been.


_As with almost every other piece, this was sitting deserted on my desktop for months before I decided to grow some balls and post it. _

_I just started thinking, idk, everyone assumes the gang is going to make it big, but if none of them do, Beck would probably take it the hardest since he (and everyone else for that matter) seems to think he's such hot stuff._

_Shameless lack of punctuation, lots of run on sentences and overuse of the word "and." Started as Beck/Jade but somehow turned into Beck Oliver introspection. Read at your own risk._

_._

_Hubris—arrogance and self-pride, originally used to refer to ancient Greek "tragic heroes" who, due to overconfidence, inevitably meet a catastrophic downfall_

* * *

If he closes his eyes tight enough, screws them shut until little bursts of color dance behind his closed lids and his head begins to throb steadily, Beck can almost remember how happy he'd once been.

It feels, Beck supposes, flat on his back in a dingy apartment downtown in New York—Chinese food containers and half-smoked cigarettes and scripts from callbacks he never gets littering the floor he lays on—quite like giving up. He thinks back on memories of a bustling high school filled with opportunity and decorated lockers and shiny smiles, where he had been the golden boy.

He smooths a hand through his hair, always greasy nowadays no matter how often he washes it, and even that small exertion of energy exhausts him, depletes whatever vigor, vitality _anything_ he had gathered in himself since the early rays of morning shone through the cracks in the blinds his filmy curtains never seem to cover, and he thumps his arm back to the floor, rolls over on his side and falls back asleep.

Beck tries to dream. He'd heard once, when he was younger maybe, happier maybe, more believing of people maybe, that dreams are very easy to manipulate. All you have to do is focus on what you want to dream about, think the thoughts you want to see play out in your mind's eye and when sleep finally comes, so will the thoughts you desire. He tries, he really does.

Beck thinks of endless halls and endless chances, a bald and badly dressed, slightly neurotic teacher who he once believed would teach him everything he needed to know, lunches outside in the warmth of LA, surrounded by palm trees and burritos and French fries and pizza without onions and a group of people he thought would be with him forever. He thinks of singing to escape prison guards and costume designers in his dressing room and bright blue highlights against newly dyed deep black hair and an RV parked outside his parents' house and that bubble of pride that used to grow so easily in him once—really, truly believing he would make something of himself.

But Beck twenty-six and his younger self's worst nightmare. He's grown up and messed up and tired and confused, and dreams don't come true for him anymore. Not even in his sleep.

* * *

_We'll call you_, they say with patient smiles, and Beck smiles back, slow and strained and bitter.

He knows they won't.

_Sure_, he answers, shrugs with easy grace, calm and sure with a great head of hair. He runs his hands through it, settles them in his pockets and walks out with a looping, careless gait.

He doesn't know why he keeps trying, why he keeps getting up every afternoon to shower despite the fact that the water runs as cold as the blood in his veins and all he has for breakfast are the murky remains of the tangerine chicken he couldn't find it in himself to finish off the night before. He doesn't know why he listens to his hapless agent anymore, the poor man with the clip-on tie and sweaty forehead who is only trying to help Beck as a favor for his father, who swears over the phone, voice raspy with incessant lies and false bravado, _that this will be it, this will be the one, I know you'll get 'em this time, tiger_. And Beck cannot find it in him to disagree, to even tell the man off for messing with his head for the ninety-seventh time or so, because it feels so good, that praise, that approval and acclaim, those compliments that had once come so easily to him, so endlessly to him.

His hands are fisted in his pockets as he walks out of the office and he squints heavily at the sun. It lights up the world, he notices, sets everything and everyone afire, but the people here don't deserve that blinding light, the burst of clarity it brings. Beck thinks New York is the unhappiest place in the world, the worst place in the world, that the sun shouldn't shine here, not now, not ever, and the sky is a blue twelve times duller than the effervescent blues and indigos of California. Beck isn't bitter and he isn't jealous. He's just tired and he forgot his sunglasses back at the apartment and he can't understand for the life of him, why the sun wastes time shining in cities like New York, when LA is where it should be.

He lowers his head so a mop of hair flops over his forehead and allows some sort of shade, some sort of relief, and smiles briefly without humor. _Maybe I am good for something after all_—he thinks, not finding it a funny thought, not finding any thoughts funny thoughts anymore, walking down the sidewalk head bowed and shoulders slumped and hands buried deep in his pockets.

He doesn't feel like Beck Oliver anymore. He doesn't feel like he even deserves that name. Beck Oliver and Tori Vega and Cat Valentine and Ja—well they are all such perfect, Hollywood names, Beck doesn't understand how they couldn't have gotten somewhere by now. He thinks of Marilyn Monroe and Lady Gaga and Cher, who didn't have perfect names at all, who changed them and altered them and made them memorable in the name of fame.

Beck would change anything and everything. He would let the whole world call him Sinjin Van Cleef (and the fact that even that name, _even that stupid name_ would make him shudder with familiarity, would make him homesick and upset shows Beck for the hundredth time just how far he has fallen) if it meant he could get somewhere and do something, if it meant his face would be plastered on magazine covers and people would love him again.

If it meant he could be somebody.

* * *

Beck couldn't tell you where he went wrong, or even if he did.

All he remembers is the last time he was really happy—the perfection of graduation: the black caps and black robes, the speeches and tears and thunderous applause timed with such heart-wrenching perfection it seemed as if they were all acting out a memorable, tear-jerking conclusion from a feel-good movie of the year. He remembers the call of New York City, the promise of it: _if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere kid,_ and knowing if anyone could make it, it would be him. He remembers wanting to get away from whatever held him back, hugging Tori's crying form, patting her softly on the back and reminding her they were all off to do bigger and better things. He remembers haunting, icy eyes, an upturned sneer and light glinting off an eyebrow ring she had probably forgotten he'd given her.

He remembers desperately wanting to forget he'd given it to her, too.

"Oh the places you'll go," she'd murmured with a cryptic smirk, sidling up to him after he'd released Tori and making his heart thrum in his throat. Her hair was mussed and her black dress was wrinkled, but her cap was still firmly in place, pinned on impeccably before the ceremony by a strangely sober Cat. She looked as winded and disheveled as the rest of them, but her face was free of mascara tracks and her nose was not red or puffy and he knew she hadn't cried, not a single tear.

When he didn't make any move to answer, still stuck in place by the weight of her stare and the lavender scent permeating from her hair, she'd rolled her eyes and given him a disgusted look, like she should have known better than to try to talk to him.

"Well," she sneered, turning away from him and giving him a view of her back, a nice view, a last view. She said over her shoulder, already walking away, already leaving him behind, "Remember to thank the little people."

Beck couldn't tell you where he went wrong, or even if he did. But he knows he should have said something to her on that day, on that monumental day in a stiff dress shirt and navy blue tie at the end of June when she had no tear tracks on her face, and only antipathy in her eyes. He doesn't know exactly what he could have said, and doesn't think it would have made much of a difference anyways, but he wishes he had said _something_.

She had always been the start of his downfall.

* * *

Beck mostly smokes and drinks nowadays, sitting close to curled up near his murky window late at night, unable to sleep and unable to dream, a thin cigarette clutched lazily in one hand and the neck of a lukewarm grey goose clutched in the other, putting each to his mouth in turns.

He could have had women like this once, a hazy, clouded voice deep in the back of his mind reminds him, he _had_ women like this once, all sordid and desperate and floundering for attention. It makes him smile ruefully, lips tilted upwards at the corners. Then he catches his reflection in the dark muggy window and he's faintly surprised to see how unhappy he still looks, how his lips curve upwards but his eyes stay dull and listless and unseeing.

He smiles wider, stretching out his mouth and exposing glimmering white teeth. Nothing. He purses his lips and takes a long drag, puffs smoke at the window, at the reflection so he can't see himself anymore (_but, he figures, it's been a rather long time since he's been able to, in any case_) and turns away from it.

He is not depressed, he reminds himself, just tired. Just tired and lonely and always hungry. Not for food though, because he's tried that. It's a different kind of hunger—one that claws him up inside out and roars to life at every missed audition, every week that goes by without a callback, every girl with pale skin and dark hair and lace up combat boots and it demands to be satiated, this hunger, demands to be filled. But he doesn't know _how_, or even why he should bother, and while one side of him urges himself to get up, make a few phone calls, visit his father, a much larger part of him remembers there's a bottle in his hand and a floor beneath his feet and to just sit and drink and sit and drink and soon it would all go away.

He closes his eyes tight and does just that, tilts the bottle back to guzzle, inhales the smoke deep into his lungs gratefully, and holds both in for as long as he can, as hard as he can, until the point of choking, until has no choice but to release with a coughing, bitter hack, and it all spills out of him—the curled smoke and clear liquid and the remnants of the meal he had the night before all spilling spilling spilling—onto the tiled floor.

It occurs to Beck after the spectacle is over—staring with half-lidded eyes at the mess he made, at the fact that he'll have to rise and clean it up before it starts to smell, before it stains—that he can't hold onto anything.

* * *

When the traffic in New York is not so bad, when it's not disturbing him to the point of wishing he had a gun, wishing he could go on a homicidal rampage and viciously kill every person who has ever honked a horn, Beck lays on his bed instead of his floor and thinks about her.

He doesn't need to close his eyes tight to see her though, he can have them wide open and staring at the ceiling and her face will come to mind, round and sharp and smirking, always making him feel fifteen and fumbling, not matter how he's grown and how he's changed. He wonders what to make of that, what that means, that everything else is blurry and unsure, foggy and fuzzy but she—her face and her body and the curve of her lips are always sharp, startlingly in focus.

Beck thinks he knows, thinks he understands, but those thoughts have always scared him a little—and no matter what he says and what everyone thinks, the part he plays, the act he puts on for every single person in his life, the man who fears nothing, has never included her.

He thinks about what he learned once during his senior year of high school in sociology class, sitting in the back row with her and her lavender highlights just a few feet away, scribbling notes endlessly.

There was a sociologist called Goffman in the nineteenth century who brought attention to these things, the way people sometimes acted differently around other people. Front stages and back stages, he'd called them, and their teacher had chuckled at that, had said how it fit perfectly with the theme of their school. He'd turned to them with solemn eyes then and explained human interactions, explained how incredible the difference sometimes was of the way a person acted and the way they really were, had explained how many people would see their front stages, but close to no one would see the back.

Beck had blinked, amazed at the idea that there was a name—_dramaturgy_—for the way he was, that others did it as well, that it had been observed and studied and theorized. He thought of his teacher's words—_many will see your front stages, but close to no one would see the back_—and his eyes flickered on instinct to Jade. Somehow he was not as surprised as he probably should have been to see her already staring steadily at him, frown on her face and eyebrows drawn together.

They stared evenly back at each other, ignoring the teacher's words, and Jade's pen had even stopped moving. They kept staring, close to unblinking and Beck was getting nervous. He felt somehow like this was a test, a test of _what_ exactly, he wasn't so sure, but he knew it was one and he had a feeling it was more important than any final he had ever taken.

Still, when her gaze became too heavy, too profound, too honest and—and too _everything_, he couldn't take it anymore. He blinked quickly and averted his eyes back to their teacher, despite being unable to actually hear the words he was saying.

She didn't look at him again for the rest of the year, and even when she did it was always half-lidded, bored, uninterested, like he'd messed up badly and there was no going back.

He still didn't understand, still couldn't grasp what type of test she had given that September day in a high school sociology class with just her eyes, but he had a feeling he'd failed.

Beck thinks about this now, but doesn't have it in him to get upset. He knows the mistakes he's made, but he also knows he's never been like Andre or Tori or even Robbie, that he's never known how to fix them, how to admit to them, how to move on from them.

_She probably doesn't even think of me anymore_, he realizes with barely a jolt, _she's probably married, raising some kids by now. _

The thought makes him ill, makes him want to vomit, but he hasn't eaten anything all day, so there's nothing to even heave or choke out.

There's just Beck and his mistakes and failures and downfall, lying worthlessly in bed when the traffic is not so bad, immersed in thoughts of a shadow girl who had slipped away eons ago.

* * *

The wind is blowing heavily and it feels like February, but Beck can't be sure. It also feels a little like November or October, but again, he can't be sure. All he does know for sure is that it's not June and it's not July, that it hasn't ever been June or July here and never would be.

The weather calls for a windbreaker or a coat, but Beck hadn't thought to slip one on before he went out and doesn't have the heart to go back to his shithole apartment until it's completely necessary. He stuffs his hands deep in his pockets and lowers his head, thinks he's almost glad he moved away, because if any of his friends had seen him now, they wouldn't recognize the person he'd turned out to be.

He raises his head to the clouds, gray and murky and looking like rain.

Out of the corner of his eye, he spots a large grey building about twelve stories tall. His heart flutters at the sight. He suddenly remembers golden California days, remembers even in windy winter how perfect the weather was, remembers having a silly idea while skipping class one day early in sophomore year, climbing up on the stage way above the completely empty asphalt café with an grumpy-glad Jade in toe, her heavy hair whipping around her head like a halo.

He doesn't think before he runs towards it. He runs right into incoming traffic, but he knows he's supposed to be up there, knows he's meant to be because although cars honk and drivers curse his existence and the existence of his mother, nothing happens to him, and he doesn't get hurt, not even a scratch.

Vaguely Beck recalls awesome feats. He remembers hearing of the hundred-and-twenty pound mother who had somehow managed to find the strength to lift a car off her child's body, a man who had once gotten a two-foot blade shoved deep into his skull during a freak accident at a sawmill, but hadn't allowed himself to die until his wife had successfully given birth. Maybe they were tall tales, but Beck somehow believes in them the way he hasn't believed in much of anything else recently.

How else could he explain reaching that building without getting run over, racing up the steps without feeling the strain on his legs or the need for breath, making it all the way to the top and not stopping until he reached the door to the roof, left slightly ajar.

He stops then, doubles over with his hands on his knees, puffing hard and suddenly glad for being without a jacket. When he manages to right himself, he wipes his sweaty hands on the fabric of his jeans, inhales deeply and pulls the door open.

The second he walks out he knows he's made the right decision. The winds whips up all around him, slapping his cheeks and pushing and pulling his clothes away from his body, crawling up his skin and lifting his hair off his forehead and making him feel so _alive_.

He wants to laugh, wants to scream, wants to cry—wants to stay up here forever with this wind, and this feeling he hasn't felt in so long. Laughter bubbles up inside him, and he can't stop it when it spills from between his lips in short, crazed bursts, causing him to double over and turn around and to open his eyes wide and to see her.

She stands near the edge of the roof, leaning easily against the concrete wall and looks at him with a raised eyebrow. She looks like she's maybe made of stone or granite of carved from gold, like maybe she's stood there her entire life waiting for him. She has on a long, fuzzy black trench coat with shiny buttons that go all the way to her knees, her hair's very dark, but somehow not black, and free of highlights. Her lips are matte and deep red, almost maroon, and Beck finally reminds himself to take a breath.

"What—" he starts, and then stops. His throat feels brittle and his voice is hoarse and raspy. He remembers this is the first time he is seeing her in ten years, and reminds himself to make the first thing he says to her worth it.

She stalks over to him in slow clicking steps, and he acknowledges that she's traded in her combat boots for classier heeled leather ones. The thought makes his heart plummet to his stomach. What else about her has changed?

She looks almost unsurprised to see him, but he knew her once and he thinks he may know her still, and he can tell the scrutinizing way she flits her eyes over his face and his hair, still dancing away from him in the howling wind. She is surprised, but in her own Jade way, and it makes him feel so stupid for running up here the way he did, for laughing the way he did.

She comes to a stop right before him, an arm's length away. _It could be no length_, he tells himself, _it could be no space, I could draw her to my chest and feel her heartbeat synchronize with mine and feel whole again for the first time in a million years. _

"I feel like I'm dreaming," she says in a murmur of a voice. Beck is floored by the sound, the weight of it and the resonance. He feels the weariness in her voice, the years that have passed in her voice—the soft surrender of it, bone deep.

He looks her over for the hundredth time, all up and down her now much too skinny body (—_and just where_ he wants to ask himself in rage, he wants to blame himself for, wants to punish himself for, _where are those hips I love? Those fleshy legs I love? Where is the softness and femininity of this woman's body? Why is she all sharp angles and hard corners? Why can I see her hip bone poking out and why hadn't I been there to take better _care_ of her and this is my _entire fault—)

There are a million thoughts and questions running through his mind, but he makes himself focus on one that really matters. He clears his throat, hopes his voice is deep and alluring, and that she will be as impressed with it now as she had been once.

"Are you…are you married now?"

It sounds desperate and too hopeful. Beck wants to cringe, wants to hate her for always being the one to make him lose his cool, always being the one who left him angry and acting up and choking over his own words, even after all this time.

It takes her a minute to answer though, and every second Beck ticks away in his head goes through him like physical pain.

"Come on, Beck" she whisper-murmurs, smiles a razorblade smile. The way she says his name is a type of magic, and she hops slightly from left to right on her tip-toes. She looks like a little girl he thinks, a little destructive girl and it makes his fingers itch to hold her to him before she flits away with the wind. "Who in their right mind would marry me?"

_Me_, he thinks viciously, even as his heart beats out hope, fills with relief, _me me me every day and every night over and over again I would marry you I would-I would-I would. _But although he thinks these words he never says them, and that's where the problem has always been in the first place.

There's a trembling that starts in his knees and moves up to his stomach, sweeping his torso and grazing the top of his head. It may be the wind, a part of him thinks, it may be the relentless, howling wind that is making his knees buckle, but a much larger part of him knows that it is this woman in front of him, that it has always been this woman in front of him.

He shoots his arms out and steps forward, grips her just above the elbows and pulls her to him until she is pressed directly up against him. Beck thinks of the ways she's changed, the leather boots and plain hair and maroon lips, but this scent permeating from her—lavender and lovely and so Jade he would think he was dreaming too, if only he did anymore—is exactly the same.

She stiffens at first, but after a few seconds she seems to reach her bearings, slides her arms up until they settle above his waist and squeezes lightly.

Beck feels his heart soar. He knows this is something, the start of something and for once he will make it right, do things right, change himself.

He releases her reluctantly and steps back until he is facing her a few feet away. He holds his arms out above him, tilts his head back and feels the wind rushing through his ears like ocean waves.

She raises her eyebrows at his behavior but there is humor there, and she cannot hide the smile sneaking over her face. Beck's heart picks up at the sight, her coat flaps wildly near her knees and her hair swirls all around her, all above her, and it looks for a second like the wind will just pluck her up and carry away from him, like maybe she'll never have been here to begin with and—

But no.

Beck will not let himself do this anymore. He screws his eyes shut tight and for once does not look to the past, does not try to grapple for what-could-have-beens. He has her again, for however eternal or for however fleeting, and she will help him, will make him believe again—in people and places and Jade and in Beck.

He holds his arms out to his sides, and the wind picks up around him, like it knows what he will say, like it understands this moment, this vital moment when he for once knows he should say something, and knows that he will.

It's almost a deafening roar now, so he raises his voice as well, despite how rusted and dry is it from disuse.

He locks eyes with hers, sees an eyebrow ring glinting, one he'd bought her so long ago, one she'd never taken off, and his heart swells at the sight and he thinks that if he fell asleep right at this very moment he would dream easily and endlessly.

"I'd like," he rumbles, holding his hands out and yelling practically, she's a few feet away but it seems like a hundred miles and he wants her in the circle of his arms again, now and forever. He looks at her—Jade West—the ultimate Hollywood name, he thinks, and knows that she'll make it someday and he would too; that they'd do it together, "To thank the little people."

* * *

_I don't know why she suddenly turned up. I'd like to think she'd been in the neighborhood for years, hoping to run into him._

_This pairing breaks my spirit, to be honest. _

_Cheers._


End file.
